Breed pushes to cut housing red tape
For the third time in as many years, Mayor London Breed will bring forward a charter amendment to streamline housing production, allowing many code-compliant developments to bypass the city’s politically charged and timeconsuming discretionary review process.
The charter amendment, which will need six votes at the Board of Supervisors in order to qualify for the June 2022 ballot, would apply to projects of more than 25 units. It would require that market-rate developers build 15% more affordable units than is otherwise required by the city. Thus, a 100unit development currently obligated to build 20 affordable homes would have to increase that number to 23. It would apply to all 100% affordable projects.
The streamlining could shave a year or two off the city’s approval process, which typically takes two years and often longer, Breed said.
“San Francisco should be a leader on creating new homes in California, and this measure will help us fundamentally change how we approve housing in this City,” Breed said. “I’ve seen too many people I grew up with move away from this city or be pushed out because they can’t afford to live here . ... We need to get rid of the bureaucracy and barriers to new housing at all income levels.”
If history is any indication, getting six out of 11 members of the Board of Supervisors to support the charter amendment could be an uphill slog.
In 2019, Breed proposed a charter amendment that would have streamlined affordable and teacher housing, but the Board of Supervisors killed it in committee. The next year Breed made a second attempt at a charter amendment — she had planned to gather signatures to get it on the ballot rather than seek approval from a majority of board members — but that
was withdrawn because of the pandemic.
The new version of the bill includes a requirement that developers seeking streamlining commit to paying prevailing wage and hiring a skilled and trained workforce, a provision that should garner the support of the city’s building trades. The charter amendment would also target families with incomes up to 140% of area median income, $186,000 for a family of four, significantly higher than currently allowed in typical subsidized units.
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí will sponsor the charter amendment, which proponents are calling Affordable Housing Now.
“We are a city living through a major housing shortage, and a major reason why is the amount of time, energy, effort and money that it takes to get housing approved,” said Safaí. “Even when you do everything right, some people in the city will find a way to stop the production of housing.”
The charter comes as state housing authorities are investigating whether the supervisors broke the law by voting down two major developments — 316 micro-units at 450 O’Farrell St. and 495 apartments at 469 Stevenson St. Safaí said that the Stevenson vote, in particular, was an “inflection point” in the city’s ongoing development fights.
A study from the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley found that the average time for a development to be permitted in San Francisco is roughly four years. Under Affordable Homes Now, qualifying projects would be required to be permitted within six months.
Laura Foote, executive director of the pro-housing advocacy group YIMBY Action, said the original idea was hatched when former Mayor Ed Lee was in office but fizzled out after he died in December 2017.
“It great that we are seeing what is a solid sensible idea for getting more housing built in San Francisco coming back,” she said.
While Foote said that polling shows that San Francisco voters are “wildly in support” of cutting red tape out of the housing approval process, she is less sure whether the board will muster up the six votes.
“The board has demonstrated they are out of step from where the voters are on housing,” she said. “It’s an open question whether they are going to support something that is going to get housing built faster.”
Council of Community Housing Organizations CoDirector Fernando Marti said that affordable housing projects have already been streamlined through various pieces of local and state legislation. He said that it’s too early to say whether the streamlining of market-rate housing yields enough in community benefits to justify it.
“What would be new is the market-rate housing piece,” he said, asking if the extra 15% of affordable units is worth streamlining the permitting process. “Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.”